The impresario of 20th century music helped find the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals and set the template for gatherings everywhere from Woodstock to the south of France.
Wein led the festival for more than 50 years and performers would include virtually every major jazz star, from Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk to Charles Mingus and Wynton Marsalis. Just in 1965, the bill featured Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, John Coltrane, Ellington, Gillespie, Davis and Monk.
Wein “can justifiably claim to have invented, developed and codified the contemporary popular music festival,” Santoro wrote. “What was a festival to me?” Wein later said. “I had no rulebook to go by. I knew it had to be something unique, that no jazz fan had ever been exposed to.” “It was a farewell to the idealism and purity of the folk revival,” Wein wrote. “There was no turning back — not for Dylan, not for anyone.”
Wein grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, his father a dentist with a gambling habit and an eye for his secretary, his mother a pianist of “passable skills” and heiress to a paper products fortune. As a teenager, he defied his family by inviting Black musicians to their home and in his 20s he dated a Black woman, Joyce Alexander, whom he married in 1959. Joyce Wein, who became his business partner and closest adviser, died in 2005.
Wein enlisted in the Army during World War II and twice escaped possible death: Hitler died in April 1945 as Wein and others were nearing the German front. Months later, he was spared being transferred to the Pacific when the Japanese surrendered.
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